In modern times with the proliferation of mobile devices, users are often in situations with accessibility to multiple mobile devices and capabilities thereof. Common capabilities of many types of mobile devices include the ability to obtain measurements of the surrounding environment or user, detect location, detect and provide network connectivity, and/or detect motion. However, when mobile devices in proximity of each other obtain and record similar measurements, this results in duplication of work and power wasting redundancy.
Meanwhile, battery life of these devices is of particular concern because mobile devices by their nature depend on a battery with limited capacity as a power source between charging sessions. Research has shown that power consumed by sensors or other input/output (I/O) mobile device components used for gaming, Global Positioning System (GPS), cellular, and other network connectivity contribute a significant amount to overall power consumption of the mobile device. In many instances, sensors, connectivity, and other I/O devices are the primary sources of battery drain. This problem will only become more acute in the future as additional types of smart sensors enter the marketplace and everyday use. The duplication of work noted above for multiple devices operating in a common environment or context to obtain substantially the same measurement is a waste of power.
Context-aware mobile applications are typically limited to “apps” that run on smartphones and do not address a range of smart-sensor devices, such as wearable mobile devices and ‘internet of things’ (IoT) sensing devices. In addition, other types of power saving schemes are applicable to large server-based software systems and fail to address widely-distributed, smart device, sensor-based systems that include multiple available mobile devices.